Eric Hoffer Quotes

Artists are people who are not at all interested in the facts - only in the truth.

Theatre critics have no special access to the truth. And there should be no objective truth to art.

Official truth is not actual truth.

the truth is artistically fallacious.

My great longing is to make those very incorrectnesses, those deviations, remodellings, changes in reality, so that they may become, yes, lies if you like - but truer than the literal truth.

Music tells no truths.

All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent.

I'm not that interested in recreating reality. I'm interested in recreating an emotional truth.

What music can do so well is tell the truth in a subjective way.

Perception is one millionth of one percent reality (truth in fact).

The writer concerned more with technique than truth becomes a technician, not an artist.

They said, 'You have a blue guitar, / You do not play things as they are.' / The man replied, 'Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.'

It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth

As if there could be true stories: things happen in one way, and we retell them in the opposite way.

All art is autobiographical.

If nothing will finally survive of life besides what artists report of it, we have no right to report what we know to be lies.

No artist tolerates reality.

If artists do see fields blue they are deranged, and should go to an asylum. If they only pretend to see them blue, they are criminals and should go to prison.

When I look at a body it gives me choice of what to put in a painting, what will suit me and what won't. There is a distinction between fact and truth. Truth has an element of revelation about it. If something is true, it does more than strike one as merely being so.

Here in the United States, we speak with reverence of authentic experience. We write poems about our daddies taking us fishing and breaking our hearts by making us throw the little fish back into the river. We even tell the reader the kind of car we were driving, the year and the model, to give the impression that it’s all true. It’s because we think of ourselves as journalists of a kind. Like them, we’ll go anywhere for a story. Don’t believe a word of it. As any poet can tell you, one often sees better with eyes closed than with eyes wide open.

Art is arbitrary but it sort of reveals itself to be right or wrong anyway.

Art- speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day and that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth. The truth lives from day to day, and the marvelous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh today.

In cases of major discrepancy its always reality thats got it wrong ... reality is frequently inaccurate.

For me with art and all that stuff - I like abstraction. I like contortion. I mean, it's still truth. But it's truth through the center of the individual. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's fallacies or falsehoods. It just happens to be one perception of what's happening.

What matters is the imaginative truth.